American Century

Missionary Diplomacy illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power.

American heiress India, Lady Kilnsey, enjoys the very comfortable life of an English peeress in her husband's ancestral castle. She is deeply in love with her earl, and he adores her. Her inherited fortune provides a life that is elegant, happy, and peaceful, but ominous clouds are gathering across the Channel. The clang of rattling sabers can be heard throughout Europe. In a few short months, their lives are altered forever. Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated, and the world explodes in war bringing previously unimaginable changes to castle life and in India herself.

Is religion disappearing from American life? Less than 50 percent of Americans now hold membership in any religious institution, and even fewer attend worship services. The decline in Christian churches is especially pronounced among the young, cutting across all denominations.

Gregory Weeks's Embracing Autonomy departs from other general treatments of Latin American-US relations not by putting US policy aside but by bringing in the Latin American and global contexts more closely and thus avoiding the incomplete picture provided by a narrow focus solely on the policies of the United States. The core of autonomy for Latin America from the United States is seen in new, deeper, and more numerous relationships that do not include the United States.

To discover the true role of Black women in the creation of American, and especially Southern, cuisine, Toni Tipton-Martin has spent years amassing one of the world’s largest private collections of cookbooks published by African-American authors, looking for evidence of their impact on American food, families, and communities and for ways we might use that knowledge to inspire community wellness of every kind. The Jemima Code presents more than 150 Black cookbooks that range from a rare 1827 house servant’s manual to modern classics.

Nineteenth-century America was rife with Protestant-fueled anti-Catholicism. Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez reveals how Protestants nevertheless became surprisingly and deeply fascinated with the Virgin Mary, even as her role as a devotional figure who united Catholics grew. Documenting the vivid Marian imagery that suffused popular visual and literary culture, Alvarez argues that Mary became a potent shared exemplar of Christian womanhood around which Christians of all stripes rallied.

In 1708, the governor of South Carolina responded to a request from London to describe the population of the colony. This response included an often-overlooked segment of the population: Native Americans, who made up one-fourth of all enslaved people in the colony. Yet it was not long before these descriptions of enslaved Native people all but disappeared from the archive. In Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina, D. Andrew Johnson argues that Native people were crucial to the development of South Carolina's economy and culture.

Americans are in the midst of a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics—across the board, consumption has shot up in the twenty-first century. At the same time, the United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, justified in part by a now zombified "war" on drugs. How did we get here?

Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, Americans underwent a dramatic transformation in self-conception: having formerly lived as individuals or members of small communities, they now found themselves living in networks, which arose out of scientific and technological innovations.

Robert L. Fleegler's narrative history of the 1988 election draws from untapped archival sources and revealing oral history interviews to uncover just how consequential this moment was for American politics. Identifying the seeds of political issues to come, Fleegler delivers an engaging review of an election that set a template for the political dynamics that define our lives to this day.

Natalie Spencer was giving a dinner. She was not an easy hostess. Like most women of futile lives, she lacked a sense of proportion, and the small and unimportant details of the service absorbed her. Such conversation as she threw at random, to right and left, was trivial and distracted. Yet, the dinner was an unimportant one. It had been given with an eye more to the menu than to the guest list, which was characteristic of Natalie's mental processes.

Showcasing the work of literary giants like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and authors whom listeners may be surprised to learn were "in the life", Black Like Us is the most comprehensive collection of fiction by African American lesbian, gay, and bisexual writers ever published.

The year is 1912. Nineteen-year-old Maisie Porter watches from the deck of the SS Oceanic as England fades from view. Her destination is Buccaneer Bay in Australia's far northwest. Her fate: marriage to distant cousin Maitland Sinclair, a man she has never met.

Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes's brilliant contemplations of personal, canonical, and allegorical literary development. Proceeding from Toni Morrison's aim to expand the landscape of literary imagination in Playing in the Dark ("I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography"), Watch Your Language charts a lyrical geography of reading and influence in poetry.

Alice may be the president's daughter, but she's nobody's darling. As bold as her signature color Alice Blue, the gum-chewing, cigarette-smoking, poker-playing first daughter discovers that the only way for a woman to stand out in Washington is to make waves - oceans of them. With the canny sophistication of the savviest politician on the Hill, Alice uses her celebrity to her advantage, testing the limits of her power and the seductive thrill of political entanglements.

An intimate account of the American Revolution as seen through the eyes of a Quaker pacifist couple living in Philadelphia. Spanning a half-century before, during, and after the war, this gripping narrative illuminates the Revolution’s darker side as patriots vilified, threatened, and in some cases killed pacifist Quakers as alleged enemies of the revolutionary cause. Amid chaos and danger, the Drinkers tried as best they could to keep their family and faith intact. A master storyteller takes his listeners on a moving journey they will never forget.

The year was 1922: World War I had just come to a close, the Ottoman Empire was in decline, and Asa Jennings, a YMCA worker from upstate New York, had just arrived in the quiet coastal city of Smyrna to teach sports to boys. Several hundred miles to the east in Turkey's interior, tensions between Greeks and Turks had boiled over into deadly violence. Mustapha Kemal, now known as Ataturk, and his Muslim army soon advanced into Smyrna, a Christian city, where a half a million terrified Greek and Armenian refugees had fled in a desperate attempt to escape his troops.

Barbara Kreiger's intriguing narrative presents the account of Clorinda Minor, a charismatic American Christian woman whose belief in the second coming prompted her to leave a comfortable life in Philadelphia in 1851 and take up agriculture in Palestine.

We are a nation of immigrants, never more than now. In recent decades, the numbers have skyrocketed, thanks to people coming from many continents—especially Asia, Africa, and South America. Just like their predecessors, they face countless obstacles, including political hatred. And yet, just like their predecessors, they work hard. They persist. And they become us. Veteran journalist, broadcaster, and interviewer Ray Suarez has crisscrossed the country to speak to new Americans from all corners of the globe, and to record their stories.

When Mary Beth McIntire settles into a vacation house on June 2, 2017, she anticipates a quiet morning with coffee. Then she hears a noise, peers out a window, and spots a man in 1950s attire standing in the backyard. She panics when the trespasser sees her and enters the house though a door to the basement. She questions her sanity when she cannot find him.